This paper investigates whether leading indicators can help explain the cross-country incidence of the 2008-09 financial crisis. Rather than looking for indicators with specific relevance to the current crisis, the selection of variables is driven by an extensive review of more than eighty...

Many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry—that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what policies or organizations look like rather than what they actually do....

We examine a new intervention to overcome gender biases in hiring, promotion, and job assignments: an “evaluation nudge,†in which people are evaluated jointly rather than separately regarding their future performance. Evaluators are more likely to focus on individual performance in...

This article examines how the effect of education on institutional trust varies cross-nationally as a function of the pervasiveness of public-sector corruption. We approach institutional trust as a performance-based evaluation of political institutions. Given their greater capacity to accurately...

Medicare continues to implement payment reforms that shift reimbursement from fee-for-service towards episode-based payment, affecting average and marginal reimbursement. We contrast the effects of two reforms for home health agencies. The Home Health Interim Payment System in 1997 lowered both...

This paper hypothesizes a phenomenon—myopic misery—in which sadness creates a myopic focus on obtaining money now versus later, increasing intertemporal discount rates and thereby producing substantial financial costs. Experiments 1-3 randomly assigned participants to a sad- or...

Ballot initiatives are consequential and common, with total spending on initiative campaigns in the US rivaling that of Presidential campaigns. Observational studies using regression approaches on observational data have alternately found that initiative campaign spending cannot affect...

Science and innovation have always been the key forces behind agricultural growth in particular and economic transformation in general. More specifically, the ability to add value to agricultural production via the application of scientific knowledge to entrepreneurial activities stands out as...

Existing learning models attribute failures to learn to a lack of data. We model a different barrier. Given the large number of dimensions one could focus on when using a technology, people may fail to learn because they failed to notice important features of the data they possess. We conduct a...

Since the United States changed its guidelines in 1984, many industrialized nations have included efficiencies defenses in their rules for judging whether mergers and other activities that might lessen competition are on balance desirable. This paper was written for an OECD competition policy...